Book Review: Mockingjay, by Suzanne Collins

Warning: this book is the third in a trilogy and therefore will inevitably contain spoilers for the first two books, The Hunger Games and Catching Fire.

District 12 is no more and Katniss and her family are now living underground in District 13, which is preparing for war with the Capitol. Everyone is expecting her to live up to the name she was given, and act as the figurehead for the revolution, the Mockingjay. But Katniss is as distrustful as ever, and with everything she's been through, it is a role she reluctantly accepts...

I'd been avoiding spoilers ever since Mockingjay came out but I managed, nonetheless, to get the impression that it was a controversial ending to the trilogy. Some people love it, others hate it, and still more think that it was okay, but would have preferred things to go differently. I wasn't sure what to expect. I knew what I wanted to see more of, and prepared myself to be disappointed.

I wasn't. I really liked it. I thought that it made sense, and stayed true to what the author wanted to get out of the story. I don't think that the Hunger Games are reality television taken to its most drastic extreme. I think that they are a more honest and direct version of what happens in real life. The Hunger Games are war in miniature. In our world, politicians, kings, and whatever else we call them, entertain themselves and gain glory by waging wars on each others' territories, largely by making other people's children fight each other. In my opinion, The Hunger Games, Catching Fire, and Mockingjay tell a story that is essentially anti-war, and the most effective way to persuade people of the horrors of war is to show us the havoc that it wreaks upon the minds and lives of those that fight it. Therefore, what I wanted and expected was to see more of the victors. I wanted to find out in more detail how being in the Hunger Games had affected them, and I did. I wasn't that concerned about the 'love triangle' or even what happens at the end of the war, but as it turns out I approved of those endings completely.

Some readers think that Katniss isn't as 'strong' in Mockingjay, but I never saw her as weak. She has been changed by everything she's been through, but that's realistic! If she just continuously kicked butt all the time it wouldn't be as exciting and interesting, and I think she became a more rounded character in this book. She thinks more carefully before she acts, and gets better at listening to other people. However, I don't think that she has essentially changed all that much.

I really liked that we got to see a lot of political intrigue. Seeing how District 13 produced their propaganda went some way towards explaining how the Capitol kept control for so long.

My most major criticism would have to be that, as with the other two books, the pacing isn't very even. I hink that this is even more obvious in Mockingjay, where it speeds up so much towards the end that I found it a bit difficult to remember everything that was going on. and to keep track of the passage of time. I also found the earlier chapters a bit disjointed, thanks to the lengthy mental tangents Katniss went off on. I could see the purpose of these sections, but they (especially the one about 'The Hanging Tree') could have been shorter and more neatly written.

There are two things that I'm not sure about. The first is the speed of the final events. I felt that everything whizzed by, some action scenes were missing, and I wanted to know more about the political mechanics, but on the other hand, I don't think that the book was ever going to go into great detail on that, because it's narrated by Katniss, whose interest in politics is minimal. The other is the epilogue. I feel like the chapter before would have made a good ending on its own, but the epilogue does revisit an imporant issue from book one, although I'm not quite happy with the way it turned out.

What did you think?

Book Review: Catching Fire, by Suzanne Collins

This book is the second in a trilogy and therefore this review will inevitably contain spoilers for the first book, The Hunger Games. In the next paragraph below the picture! So if you haven't read it or watched the film and want to without spoiling the end, stop reading this blog post now. Seriously!

Photo by Dave Stokes

So Katniss and Peeta have won the 74th Hunger Games and returned home to District Twelve, where they now live in comparative luxury in the mansions reserved for victors. Whilst her sister and mother enjoy their new surroundings, Katniss misses the comparative freedom of her old life - hunting with Gale in particular. The Victory Tour is approaching and Katniss knows she will have to start pretending to be madly in love with Peeta again, otherwise all their lives will be at risk. The stakes become even higher when she hears about  possible rebellions in other districts, and there is also the approaching Quarter Quell to worry about - a special version of the Hunger Games that takes place every twenty-five years.

Some readers have said that they didn't enjoy Catching Fire as much as The Hunger Games. Not me! I loved it. I really liked how the plot developed and enjoyed trying to work out what was going on. However, I can see where they're coming from in that there are a lot of similar scenes to the first book, and then not much is revealed until the end. You finally find out what's going on at the end of the book but then of course it's the end of the book! Argh. I wouldn't say Catching Fire is filler as it does advance the plot and characterisation, but if I'd read these books when they were originally published, and didn't have access to Mockingjay straight away, I would have been really frustrated.

I think the characterisation was better in Catching Fire than in The Hunger Games, simply because Katniss spends more time with more other people. In the first book, she spent most of her time in the arena, alone, which was fantastic for setting her up as a self-reliant, clever individual, but we didn't really get to know the other tributes, or her family and friends. I really liked seeing how Katniss' relationships with the other characters developed in Catching Fire, slow as that development might be, and finished absolutely thrilled about the prospect of the final book, Mockingjay.

Book Review: The Hunger Games, by Suzanne Collins

I first heard of The Hunger Games trilogy in 2009, when I worked at a bookshop. Many of my colleagues told me that I must read it, some even suggesting that a good time to read it would be soon. We didn't have the first book in the shop for almost the whole time I worked there - as soon as it came in, someone would buy it - though there were plenty of copies of Catching Fire (they were on special offer).

Naturally, my TBR being what it has been since I rediscovered the joys of teen lit, I proceeded to not read it anywhere near immediately. I decided to move it higher up the list when I heard that a film was being made. Then I saw the trailer and thought 'this looks like such a good book. Must get it next year'. Despite the excitement generated by the trailer, I was still a bit nervous about whether I'd like the book. Yes, everyone raved about it. But plenty of people raved about Twilight and I resented every excruciating page. But The Hunger Games had one thing going for it that Twilight didn't: there were people who hated Twilight that said The Hunger Games was good.

So I kept it on the to-read list, and now, after determinedly ignoring forum posts and blog discussions and everything else laden with spoilers for the last two and a bit years, I have actually read The Hunger Games. I read it the week before the film came out. Just before it became The Book everyone was reading on the train. In before the hordes. Oh yeah!

I'm not going to write a synopsis. You know what this book is about. If you don't, here's the film trailer, I hope it gets you excited to read it too!



As I said above, I wasn't completely expecting to like it. But I was hooked from, I don't know, page two? 'This is much better than Twilight,' I said. Probably aloud. The plot is gripping and it only gets better as the story progresses and the consequences of everyone's actions are fully revealed.

Katniss actually does stuff, and thinks about the consequences for her and her family, at least most of the time. I found her an interesting and appropriate heroine for the story. A more silly, flighty, romantic sort of heroine would not have worked with The Hunger Games' plot, in my opinion. I also liked the way her family background was a source of both comfort and anxiety for her, it all helped to shape her character. She's guarded and doesn't trust easily but she has reasons for that.

I had mixed feelings about Peeta, her male counterpart . Yes, he's a romantic idealist, and I can understand why. He works as a great foil for Katniss - but there were a few intriguing elements to his character that I wanted to know more about. I also wanted to know more about Haymitch and Madge, which made me think that it would be likely that the rest of the trilogy would hold my interest easily.

I did get a bit confused about the geography of District 12, but I found the level of description of the arena to be just right. I could picture it easily in my head but there wasn't so much detail that it got boring (I will freely admit to skipping the eight pages devoted to description of a church in Swann's Way).

I wasn't entirely convinced by the way the Games ended, but it wasn't enough to stop me from eagerly reserving Catching Fire at the library!



Reviews that helped convince me that I needed to read this book:

Addicted to Heroines

Book Review: The Book of Blood and Shadow, by Robin Wasserman

When Nora decided to swap school classes for the Latin translation project at the local university, she didn't expect it to take over her life. It was just a way to get out of school for a few hours a week, to add something extra to her college applications, and to spend more time with her best friend Chris. But when she is assigned the letters written by Elizabeth Weston, stepdaughter of the alchemist Edward Kelley, to her brother, she finds herself fascinated by Elizabeth's life, the decisions she has to make, and her attempts to carry out her father's wishes and build the Lumen Dei - a machine that, according to myth, is a direct line to God. Nora doesn't believe a word of it, of course, but it's interesting, and she's falling for one of the other students, sweet, quiet, Max.

Nora and her colleagues are not the only one fascinated by the project. Firstly, their professor suffers a stroke that may not have been natural - an ambiguous warning that they do not heed. Then comes the night that changes everything. Nora arrives at Chris' house to find him dead and his girlfriend Adriane in some kind of waking coma. Max has fled the scene, the prime suspect in the murder. Nora is sure that her gentle boyfriend couldn't have done it, and she is determined to solve the mystery of the Lumen Dei and clear his name.

The Book of Blood and Shadow has been described as a YA version of The Da Vinci Code which made me feel quite apprehensive about picking it up, because I've never read The Da Vinci Code nor do I have any desire to! But it has such a pretty cover and Atom kindly sent me a review copy, so I decided to give it a chance.

I immediately liked Nora's narration. She's quite a serious teenager, but she's still got a definite voice. It's quite surly, and at times she can be a bit self-pitying, but not so often that it's hard to read. I think the style of the narration will definitely appeal more to older readers. I also really liked the supporting characters, although I wanted to get to know them better than the novel allowed me to, especially Eli. One thing that bothered me was that all of the parents were conveniently incompetent or distracted by their own emotional problems, and I know that the lack of parental interruptions made the plot move faster, but it felt unrealistic to me. I was intrigued by Nora's dad and I would have liked to have seen more of him.

I also really liked the translation element to the story, it helped to push the plot forward and kept me interested. Like Nora, I really wanted to uncover the story of Elizabeth Weston and the choices she made, in fact, I was more intrigued by Elizabeth than by her project, the Lumen Dei.

It was pretty easy to keep reading, because although none of the plot developments took me by surprise, I really wanted to know how everything would be explained in the end. I enjoyed The Book of Blood and Shadow a lot, but I have to admit to being dissatisfied by the book's conclusion. The speed at which the climactic scenes flew by made the book seem top-heavy, and not enough was explained - I'm referring to the Lumen Dei in particular.

If the ending of The Book of Blood and Shadow is a door, I would say that it's left slightly ajar. There's no obvious route for a sequel to take, but Nora's conclusions seem shaky and there's a lot that she could be wrong about. I probably would read a sequel, if it contained some good explanations! And more Prague.

For some spoilery thoughts on the Lumen Dei, highlight below. If you don't want to read it and you're a subscriber, you should probably scroll down really fast just in case!

So how does it work? The blood goes in and then how does the light/fire appear? There's no way I can think of that this machine would do anything without divine intervention, but Nora doesn't think about this at all! And that really bothered me. Okay, if she saw the mechanism and could tell that it was capable of doing what it did, that'd be one thing. But she couldn't (to be fair she gave about two glances worth of description) so are we supposed to believe that it was God that made it do its thing? And if so, why does Nora not think about the fact that she has seen proof of God's existence afterwards? Regardless of whether she thinks God is great or not, she can't exactly carry on being an atheist after that.

Book Review: The Butterfly Tattoo, by Philip Pullman

Trailer for the 2008 feature film adaptation of the book, The Butterfly Tattoo.

I can't think of a better way to summarise this short thriller than its opening line: 'Chris Marshall met the girl he was going to kill on a warm night in early June, when one of the colleges in Oxford was holding its summer ball.' Chris is a seventeen-year old boy, working for Barry Miller and his company, Oxford Entertainment Systems. He is between childhood and adulthood, planning on going to university, and still dealing with the break up of his parents' marriage. The girl who becomes the catalyst that changes everything is Jenny, a few years older, more mature, but with a much more unstable life, living in a squat and taking odd jobs. When they find each other, everything becomes sweeter for both of them, but only for a little while, before Barry Miller confides in Chris that there is a man called Carson after him, and asks him to help him build a hideout near the canal.

Chris is a character who rushes into everything. From his romance with Jenny, to the conclusions he jumps to about Barry, he barely takes a moment to question what he is doing, to question himself. He decides to see the world as black and white, even when it makes no sense, even when everything in his own life is about shades of grey. He is the sort of person that I find very frustrating, but that makes a good character. Jenny is more sympathetic, wiser, but more tragic, especially as Chris gives her hope that her life can get better. The reader knows how the story will end at the start and I think this gives the book a strange kind of energy. I knew the two young protagonists were hurtling towards certain doom, even during the happy times, and that made me want to jump into the book and change things (a bit like a Brecht play).

I enjoyed reading The Butterfly Tattoo, but I was glad that it was such a short book. There was far too much telling, and not enough showing, and it was based around the dreaded insta-love, at least on Chris' part. I thought it was pretty clear that Chris was in lust rather than in love because he was infatuated with Jenny from the start, without knowing anything about her. Jenny doesn't get as obsessed as quickly so there is a good contrast there, but I would have liked to have seen him realise that he wasn't really in love with her, or to at least have the author acknowledge it. As for the ending, I predicted what would happen a few pages before it did, but it was still quite creepy and poignant. 

The Butterfly Tattoo is the only book I have read by Philip Pullman that isn't part of the His Dark Materials trilogy, and I was a bit disappointed by it. I think that as it is far shorter than any of those books, it's intended for a much more reluctant reader than I have ever been. I can see it appealing to teenagers who don't read a lot, with its dark subject matter and tight plot. However, The Butterfly Tattoo was originally published in 1992 (as The White Mercedes), reissued in 2005. Nobody in the story has a mobile phone, and if there had been mobile phones, all the disasters in the plot could have been easily averted. I found this distracting enough! The film adaptation was produced in 2008, and I haven't seen it, but I would like to find out how they dealt with this issue.

Book Review: Blood Ties, by Sophie McKenzie

Theo has a bodyguard and he doesn’t know why. After his latest attempted escape, he demands that his mother explain. She confesses that the father he thought was dead is still alive, in hiding because of a terrorist organisation – the Righteous Army against Genetic Engineering - out to kill him to stop his genetic research. Theo can’t just accept this and wants to track his father down, and this leads him to Rachel.

Rachel feels fat, ugly, and stupid. She doesn’t have any friends and her parents are always comparing her to her sister Rebecca, who died before she was born. Then Theo turns up, and she fancies him immediately. She finds herself making excuses for them to be together whilst researching the connection between their parents. Rachel manages to organise things so that they go together to Rachel’s school disco, but are ambushed by RAGE and rescued by a stranger who takes them away to meet Theo’s father and discover terrible secrets about themselves.

I guessed several details in Blood Ties before they were revealed to the protagonists, Theo and Rachel, so I’m not sure how effective it is as a thriller. I don’t read thrillers very often, and I don’t think I’ve read a teen/YA thriller before. It has the right pace, I think, and the narration alternates between the protagonists, which kept me wondering what the other one thought and itching to read their reaction. I thought this was very effective in this story, because Theo and Rachel are quite different and have contrasting strengths and weaknesses which they use or are let down by and it was interesting to compare them. I think it also helps to make the book appealing for both male and female readers.

I liked the first third of this book better than the rest. I thought the scenes of Theo and Rachel at school or hanging out with Theo’s friends were really well done, and I wished the minor characters from these sections reappeared later on in the story as I really liked them! Once Theo, Rachel, and their mysterious protectors were on the run, I just didn’t find it as interesting, although the pace was faster.

I did hope Rachel would confront her body issues in a bit more of an upfront manner than she did, when she became fitter because her survival depended on it and found out her own secret history, I had hoped that she would realise that comparatively, looking good isn’t that important, or derive more confidence from what she has to go through. She does seem to grow a little bit in this way but mostly she changes because other people tell her she’s attractive rather than because she finds a way to believe more in herself.

I enjoyed reading Blood Ties but I don’t think I’m really suited to this genre. I like characters and personal dramas and less running and fighting!